The woman says that the predatory student Zhenhao Zou violated her hours before the second attack

Two women who said they were drugged and raped by the prolific sex offender Zhenhao Zou, said they had been attacked in each other, the BBC was established.

The first woman who said she had been raped to us that she had been shocked to find out about the second attack and had since had a guilt of not having reported her rape earlier.

The detectives of the metropolitan police investigating Zou offenses were initially wondered if the two women could be the same person, because the two attacks seemed identical and occurred in such a short period of time.

This moment showed that Zou was confident, said a familiar source with the investigation at the BBC World Service. “He was doing it, so he wanted to do it more and more,” they said.

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual violence

Zou was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum duration of 24 years, in June.

The Chinese national was sentenced to drugs and raped 10 women – three in the United Kingdom and seven in China – between September 2019 and May 2023. All the victims seem to have been Chinese.

But after his trial, detectives – having described Zou as one of the “most prolific predators” in the United Kingdom – said they feared that he attacked 50 more women.

Since the Zou trial, 24 women have come forward in the United Kingdom and China, including the victims of these two attacks.

The first woman, whom we call Rachel, says that she met Zou to have a drink at the end of October 2022. He led her to her villa by the water in the village of Zhuupsha, near the Chinese city of Dongguan, where he gave her a cocktail of whiskey which left her so dizzying that she says that she could barely move. After she lying down upstairs to recover, she says he raped her.

Telephone recordings and messages shared with the BBC Reveal had tried to call a friend to get help thereafter, but Zou had caught his phone and told him about the friend himself.

Zou only returned Rachel’s phone to him the following afternoon. In a series of frantic messages on the Chinese application WeChat, Rachel told her friend that she was still at Zou and asked why she could not come and pick her up.

Her friend explained that she had heard Rachel shouting with the phone help, but that Zou would not reveal her address.

“My friend was afraid that if she kept asking, he would go to the extreme and hurt me,” Rachel told the BBC. She says Zou ended up dropping her house just before 2:00 p.m. “Man treated me like a toy,” she said.

Rachel said that she had not pointed out her rape to the police in China because she feared that she did not have enough evidence and she was worried about discovering people.

We do not know exactly what was in the cocktail that Rachel drank, but when the British police have made a descent into the apartment in London in Zou, they found a substance that converted into drugs for the GHB in the body.

The substance is a drug controlled in the United Kingdom, but can be easily purchased without a prescription in China to treat insomnia, where it costs as little as $ 3 (£ 2.22) by 500 ml, the BBC revealed.

Zou had also repeatedly sought information on a sleep drug which is prohibited in the United Kingdom but available on prescription in China, according to evidence presented during his trial.

A screenshot of WeChat messages circulating among the former classmates of Zou, seen by the BBC, shows that Zou had started looking for sleeping pills in China in January 2020, asking a friend if he knew someone who had prescribed them to whom he could “buy directly”.

The second victim who was attacked the same day in October 2022 is called a woman D, because his identity was not known to the British police at the time of the Zou trial. However, he was convicted of having raped her using video evidence of her devices. She contacted the British police shortly after the end of her trial in March 2025, after learning her conviction.

Thanks to the documents indicated during his trial, we established that Zou met a woman D for a date only a few hours after bringing Rachel back to the house. He drugged and raped her, spinning the attack. In a declaration of impact on the victim read during the conviction of Zou in June, the wife of said that she had not been able to escape until 4:00 am the next day.

Rachel – The first victim at the end of October 2022 – also decided to report his experiences to the MET police in March 2025. With the help of an independent translator, she submitted an anonymous statement by e -mail.

Responding to his report, a police officer asked for more information on Rachel’s identity, saying that he “seemed to have already had contacts with this person” and that the account seemed “very identical to that we already have from this period”.

Rachel said she said she had never reported the case to Chinese or British police.

The BBC checked that the initials shared by the MET in correspondence to verify Rachel’s identity with her, in fact belonged to woman D.

Zou studied at Queen’s University in Belfast from 2017, before going to London in 2019 to make a master’s degree and then a doctorate at UCL.

Police of the MET still call on the victims to come forward by contacting survivors@met.police.uk. He told us that his investigation into Zou continues, especially in connection with the Crown Prosecution Service around new potential accusations.

The inspiration of Det Ch Tariq Farooqi said: “The extent of his offense – which lasted two continents – made him one of the most dangerous sex offenders that Met has ever judged.”

In her declaration of impact on the victim, a wife of said that she had been haunted by nightmares after the attack and “could not be alone after nightfall”.

Rachel says she believes that if she had called the police the next day, a woman D may not have become a victim. “I know everyone will say that it is their fault, not mine, but I’m still sorry.”

Since his conviction, former Zou schoolchildren in China have revealed how he had asked them for advice on the assembly of spy cameras who may have helped him keep a file of his crimes – including just before the British police arrested him for the first time.

A series of messages, shared with the BBC, seem to show Zou asking for advice on the construction of mini cameras of December 21, 2023. Documents subject to the Court during the Zou test broadcast, he looked online “hidden camera” and “electric camera” on the same day and made purchases on ebay of the surveillance equipment.

Zou again sent a message to the same friend on January 17, 2024.

He was arrested by police seven days later.

During a search in his apartment in London, the police then found a spy camera in a box alongside a memory card containing video evidence of his rapes.

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